Cyber Attacks – The Challenge Of Modern World

Technology nowadays has become a part of our life and without a doubt it has already becoming one of the most crucial aspects of our life as well as the community. Even a simple task as string a hot coffee in the proses of making it has been taken over by technology called ‘self-stirring mug’. If a small and yet simple task like that was already taken over by technology, what about other daily work or tools that we need and must to use? Surely we will be using a lot of our new best friend. Meanwhile living in this new modern era where society sometimes prefer strong internet connection a lot more than human’s affection, we cannot escape the fact that our everyday life has and must continue with the presence of internet along side us. With this friends escorting our daily life, surely we will encounter problem related to them. The one that could give one of the most devastating effect to us is cyber attack.

Cyber attack is definite as an attack, via cyberspace, targeting an enterprise’s use of cyberspace for the purpose of disrupting, disabling, destroying, or maliciously controlling a computing environment/infrastructure; or destroying the integrity of the data or stealing controlled information. In other word cyber attack can simply explain as attack launched from one device or more devices against another devices or network. One of the goals is to disable targeted devices or to knock it off. As an example, a well know case, The Melissa virus (1999). In this case, the creater of this virus, David Smith had made a virus which infected Microsoft Word document which make it automatically disseminates the document and this end up costing $80 million of damage.

The other goal of cyber attack is to gain access of the device’s data. In 2009, Google China was breech and the hackers manage to gain access to Gmail account and a few other Google’s property and a few targeted email was accessed without permission and the data inside was stole.

Finally, the most dangerous goal of cyber attack is to take control over victim devices or accounts. There are many cases reported and manage to make a headline on newspaper which is a young hacker, Jonathan James was reported to manage penetrate the computers of US Department of Defense division and installed a ‘backdoor’ on its servers allowing him access and control towards the computers. He also manage to steal NASA software which causing almost $1.7 million. With this much damage cyber attack gives there are still a lot of people who is not used to the phrase ‘cyber attack’. Most people said that phrase itself is rarely used or even head, so they don’t really find that cyber attack is something to be afraid of or at least think that cyber attack is not harmful as cancel could give but the truth is cyber attack happen almost every minutes and people will think it as a unique case or a really unlucky day if someone happen to be a victim of cyber attack.

Cyber attack could happen to anyone weather you are a businessman, a teacher, a doctor or even just a clerk and this cyber attack has happen a lot of people and we could be the potential victim since most of us did not know how to protect our self from becoming one. There are so many factor regarding of why people get hack. The technique used by people with bad attention to launch an attack on our personal device or devices used for our work itself is the main reason why people could be a potential victim or has been a victim of cyber attack. One of them is ‘phishing’. This technique is used to fool victim into clicking harmful ads or email from hacker resulting, people end up giving up their own personal information to hackers without them realizing it. In this method of cyber attack, people usually just click any ads that pop up in their devices. Most of the victim are fooled by sales offered in the pop up ads making them clicking the link and end up becoming one of the victim.

Other technique used in cyber attack is ‘malware’. Using this technique hackers will use a malicious software to the targeted devices then later on gain access toward the device and manage to steal private information of a person or even private information of a company. This method usually used together with phishing technique. Hackers will first put bait to the targeted devices and when the owner or the user of the device was fool into clicking it or fulfill the form given, the malicious software will automatically downloaded into the device. So the factors of why people become a victim is actually from their own lack of knowledge of how easy cyber attack could happen and how to avoid it.

‘Denial of service attacks’. With this method, hacker would use bogus traffic to overwhelm the web server. This method usually used by hackers to launch an attack toward a high profile company in order to gain access toward their main server to either steal a million dollar information or even worst to take over the server and cause huge damage and in certain case could lead to death of many innocent citizen. In a case happen in Australia, a hospital sever was attack and hack by a group of hackers and it resulting of death of patient whom attach toward machine in order to survive and stay alive. Unlucky the alarm of the devices connected to the patient that was meant to notify nurses and doctors if the patient condition dramatically change was turn off by the hackers when they decide to turn of the life support devices.

Lastly, the method of ‘man in the middle attack’. The main goal of this method is to fool the targeted device into joining a compromise network which finally end up the admin or the user of the device lost access or power over their devices. Again the reason why so many people has become the victim of cyber attack is because of their own lack of knowledge. As a future engineers, the challenge is real and soon will become harder by the minutes. So the main solution that we could take as a so called future engineers is to fulfill and increase the number of engineers that pursue the tittle of cyber engineers. Nowadays, many young engineers are attracted to have a big monthly income, so many of this young engineers decide to be and work so hard so that they could work in oil and gas industry. This has actually become a trend among young engineers and fresh graduate. With this, I would like to recommend to both fresh graduate and young engineers to pursue or continue their field of engineering in the cyber filed since the thread and challenges of cyber attack is so real and the effect are so devastating. With the increase number of cyber engineers, the world could become a better world and a safer world from modern world thread.

As a conclusion, as the world rotate and becoming more modern every single minute, the challenge of modern world is real and people really do need to be fully aware about this and together the society and engineers could find a better way in coping with this massive thread. The more and sooner people aware that cyber attack a real thread to this modern era the more and better solution could be given and maybe in the future, people would invent a devices or anything that could fight cyber attack as nothing could in this period of time.